City artist Winfred Rembert's story comes to light in 'All Me' (video)

Donna Doherty, Register Arts Editor

Published 12:00 am, Friday, April 27, 2012

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Adelson Galleries photo: Rembert's "Chain Gang - The Ditch" is one of many paintings on the subject.

Adelson Galleries photo: Rembert's "Chain Gang - The Ditch" is one of many paintings on the subject.

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Ducat Media photo: A scene from the documentary "All Me" shows Winfred Rembert at work in his Newhall Street home studio.

Ducat Media photo: A scene from the documentary "All Me" shows Winfred Rembert at work in his Newhall Street home studio.

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Adelson Galleries photo: The fields may be gone, but Rembert captures memories made as a 3-year-old in "Cotton Rows."

Adelson Galleries photo: The fields may be gone, but Rembert captures memories made as a 3-year-old in "Cotton Rows."

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Adelson Galleries photo: Rembert's "Hamilton Avenue."

Adelson Galleries photo: Rembert's "Hamilton Avenue."

City artist Winfred Rembert's story comes to light in 'All Me' (video)

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NEW HAVEN -- Winfred Rembert had quite the story to tell, a story of survival that has inspired his unique leather paintings.

Rounded up during a 1960s civil rights demonstration, tossed in jail, working a chain gang, his impoverished life in Cuthbert, Ga., are all captured scenes that garnered him regional recognition and a solo show at the esteemed Adelson Galleries last year in New York. But one filmmaker felt that story needed a much wider audience than an "art world" audience.

Vivian Ducat's award-winning documentary "All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert," which chronicles Rembert's art and the story, people and settings which inspired that art, will be screened Thursday at 5:30 p.m. in the Robert L. McNeil Jr. Lecture Hall at Yale University Art Gallery, and again at 3 p.m. June 24 as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas' Freedom's Journey.

For Rembert, it's a thrill and a validation of sorts for the man whose work YUAG director Jock Reynolds first gave to the public back in 2000.

"Oh man, I'm just overwhelmed with it, because it covers my life, the special things I talk about. For them to go and investigate behind me all those who were real live people that I talk about.

"That's just fantastic for me, because some of the things I say about people may seem a little far-fetched. To go and investigate, to Americus and Cuthbert, Ga., and to see about those, makes me so happy."

Ducat says it was karma that brought artist and filmmaker together.

The former BBC TV filmmaker, whose Ducat Media develops projects mostly for arts organizations, got mailing for a "random opening, which was Winfred's" at Adelson Galleries in Manhattan in April 2010 that was billed as a charity event for autism. As the mother of two children on the autism spectrum, one involved in a family autism arts program, Ducat was compelled to go.

"I saw this amazing art and met this amazing man," she says. "I'm a filmmaker, but the last decade I've been doing shorter informational pieces. I saw this as an opportunity, because there was very little contextual information on the wall. I wanted to know more.

"I went up to him and said, 'How did you do this?' He told me about the prison, and for the rest of the opening I barraged him for the stories."

Rembert's story is well chronicled: a hard life in Georgia of the segregated South where he remembers picking cotton in the fields as a child with his aunt, a near lynching and castration by white supremacists, a run-in with police at a civil rights demonstration that landed him in jail and on a chain gang for seven years.

But there's happiness, too -- the small-town, good-times-in-the-juke-joint memories rooted deep within a soul rich with a joy for where he is today: a father of eight children and husband to wife, Patsy, and an artist.

Ducat convinced gallery owner Jan Adelson that the gallery needed to have a film about Rembert, and that she was the one to do it. Adelson agreed, but wanted it while the exhibit was still up.

The whole experience gave Ducat deja vu. Her artist mother was bitter about how "difficult it was to crack the New York gallery scene. I felt it was karma. I said to Winfred, 'You seem so blase about being in this gallery that my mother would have killed to be in.' He said, 'Well, I don't know much about this gallery. These people are people I don't know. It would mean more to me if my own people saw what I've done.'"

With Rembert's words resonating, and some diligent research by her husband and co-producer Ray Segal into Rembert's old haunts and the people whose names peppered his stories, Ducat knew she had to go full length. The journey of the 79-minute film began, with Rembert returning to Georgia so Ducat could add to the footage she'd shot in New Haven. They even arranged a weeklong exhibit in Albany, Ga., that introduced the new South to Rembert the artist.

"It was emotionally very hard for me to make this film," Ducat says. "It reminded me of my parents. I'm a child of two World War II refugees. When Winfred tells that story about being dragged through the streets, it sounds exactly like the story my cousin tells. There's a universality to Winfred's story in other ways, too."

Rembert's natural storytelling ability is a great asset in the film. He loves filling in the background of each painting, as much as Ducat has loved seeing the innocent glee with which Rembert has viewed the Capitol in moonlight, Los Angeles, Chicago, Arkansas, Salem, Mass. (where they even had a flash mob), East Hampton, N.Y. (where it premiered), just some of the stops on the film festival route the documentary has taken -- garnering standing ovations and picking up a few awards along the way as well as a distributor in Snag Films (buy or rent it at Amazon.com, and for more info go to www.snagfilms.com/allme).

Ducat notes, "My representative (U.S. Rep.) Charlie Rangel gave us a screening at the Library of Congress, and we went to D.C. for that ... and Aug. 23 Winfred's going with my family to San Francisco to the Museum of the African Diaspora."

"In Los Angeles, it was the first black audience I ever had," says Rembert. "There were maybe two white people in the whole place. It was at the Magic Johnson Theater. That was fantastic, a good show."

One place Rembert still hasn't seemed to crack is New Haven.

"I get invited all over this country, and I feel bad about that. To tell the kids of New Haven my story ... I would love to show that documentary all over the schools in New Haven and get questions. That would be so nice," he says.

He says he's never been contacted by the public schools to tell his story, show kids what they can be with a will, a dream and determination. His appearance at a workshop Wednesday at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, he says was set up by Yale, not the school system.

After this week's screenings, the Ducats and the Remberts will meet May 5 for a closing reception of Rembert's "Amazing Grace" exhibit at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N.Y.

A New York Times review of it called Rembert's work ... "important because it offers an unvarnished view of the segregated South, from the vantage of a lived history. What makes it resonate, however, is Mr. Rembert's incredible spirit -- what one writer in the catalog calls his 'grace.' You feel it throughout these works, which refuse to shrink from the horrors ... Even in the dreaded cotton fields, Mr. Rembert could find something to love."